The New Internet:
When everything becomes smart.
There is going to be a future where you will be able to write “www” on almost every device. In fact, “the internet of things”, as it is called, is not so far from now. At the time when we discovered the concept, we must humbly admit we thought it was one more of those tendencies aiming to make our already “deviced” life even more dependent of cables and chargers. However, the idea behind the internet of things is ambitious as it will likely produce fundamental changes in economies and societies.
When we advertise one of the core products of Jeeni that is called Jeeni Mobile, we use slogans such as “…because the world is going mobile”. By “mobile” we mean the small portable device whose screen, nowadays, is going bigger and bigger, but Kevin Ashton had another idea in mind when he coined the term the internet of things already in 1999. Let’s picture the foreseen future to make things more understandable.
Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Although used indistinctly, the internet and the World Wide Web — or simply “web” — are not the same. The Internet is a huge network with tons of information, which connects millions of computers globally. The information is transmitted using “protocols” (languages). Precisely access that information is what the Web is useful for. Using the HTTP protocol and web browsers such as Firefox ,Chrome or Safari , the information, displayed on websites, gets right into our computers and other devices. Thus, if the internet were a pie, the web would be a significant slice of it, but not the whole.
Steve is at work. He wears a smart watch able to report his allowed saturated fat per day is about to be reached. So, he activates his sleeping tablet right away, and asks his refrigerator (at home) what stuff is available for dinner, querying specifically “low saturated fat content”. The refrigerator, a light trendy device able to scan every simple piece of food it contains and to calculate and also display what their composition is, replies in seconds providing an accurate list of things. Two green lights and one red start blinking on top of the tablet screen more or less at the same time. One indicates the air conditioning has been switched off because nobody is at home. The other one says the energy administrator device has started providing electricity to the smart grid system once the domestic energy requirements are guaranteed for that day. And the third red light reminds Steve the garden is getting thirsty and the irrigation system will start working right after 7 p.m., exactly when herbs and fruit trees can take more advantage of water because the evapotranspiration diminishes (unless he wants to change that). Before deciding to get more serious with his job duties, Steve wants to say “hi” to his two dogs, so he “calls” them using a sort of dog-friendly mobile app connected to a home device which emits humanly-imperceptible sounds and, obviously happy, the two long-eared animals find the corner of the house where a screen shows Steve’s face.
Solving the traffic collapse
You may be probably asking yourself: is the internet able to support so many devices, all of them connected at the same time? No. it wasn’t or more precisely, it was about to not being able until another parallel massive network called the IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) started to work in 2013, aiming at solving the problem of IPv4 address exhaustion . When the IPv4 was created in 1981 by DARPA (a United States Department of Defense Agency) framed in a research project, others were the circumstances and motivations and no one thought the revolution that invention would cause in the decades to come.
IPv4 and IPv6 are communication protocols providing identification and location systems for computers on networks and routing traffic across the Internet. The IPv6 will provide 3.4×1038 addresses, largely overcoming the 4.3 billion addresses provided.
Understanding the WEB 3.0
By 2004, the world started talking about the Web 2.0. It was the time of My Space, when the once most influential social media in the world had more visits than the very same Google. Since then, we understood that the World Wide Web was more than an inert static showcase of endless information but rather a virtual place to socialize, share and collaborate. Familiar things to us, such as blogs, social media, wikis, web applications, etc. as we know them nowadays, arose at that time. With the Web 2.0 as an umbrella, appeared the Enterprise 2.0. In 2006, Andrew McAfee coined this name which refers to software platforms allowing collaboration, sharing and organizing information within companies, between companies and between them and their stakeholders. So, what is next? What is coming after Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc., the Web 2.0 and all the other stuff?
Experts have already started talking about the Web 3.0 or “the semantic web” . And, in fact, we do not have to wait for. It is arriving slowly but definitely to stay. Search engines are becoming more intelligent and able to understand what we precisely want by making logical connections between pieces of information we have requested before. Searching will be less and less about key words and more about interpreting “semantic” expressions (to make it simple, semantic has to do with the meaning behind what we say). Metadata — in simple words, the description of the characteristics of the container of data — is being indexed to web pages, so they can “talk” to each other to improve the user experience. But the Web 3.0 may bring other innovations: a great part of the websites will provide 3D vision options, social networks will become more complex and more interactive, the Enterprise 2.0 will evolve to Enterprise 3.0, and its flexibility and responsiveness — in terms of sizes and layouts — will increase as more devices of various shapes and sizes be capable to access the web.
The steps followed by the internet evolution are nicely described by Kerry Maxwell . The internet 1.0 was “read-only”, the internet 2.0 has been “read-write” and the Internet 3.0 might be “read-write-execute” (hopefully), namely, “a version of the Web in which users can create and execute their own tools and software to manipulate and extract information”, as Mrs. Maxwell describes. It seems like we are gradually assisting to a sort of democratization process of the internet, where everybody will have the right to create and say, so, the power to influence. And because of the increasing impact the internet undoubtedly has on the way we live and understand the world nowadays, that process may produce even deeper changes.
From technical to political
Most of us, or probably we all agree on the importance of the internet nowadays. Reasons are countless, at social, political, educational or even personal levels. We summarize this fact by asking this simple question: Can you afford to live without internet? We, at Jeeni, honestly, cannot. Now, have you asked yourself who is responsible for keeping the web running? Who’s behind? Who does the control of assignment of domains and the creation of organizational suffixes such as .com, .net or .biz? Until now, ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Name and Numbers) a non-for-profit organization located in the U.S. is responsible for keeping the internet secure, stable and interoperable and for assigning and controlling domains and suffixes. Those tasks are only part of what is called “internet governance”. The concept embraces a much more complex bunch of topics. Wikipedia defines internet governance as “practices and operations that are consistent with the sovereign rights of states and the social and market interests of end-users and operators. It includes agreements about standards, policies, rules, and enforcement and dispute resolution procedures”. Undoubtedly, that makes sense, it’s correct and fair. However, what the world discovered in 2013 when Edward Snowden revealed the massive spy calls and Internet data made by U.S. authorities to embassies, diplomatic missions or even universities in different countries, shown a complete different picture of the reality.
Recently, Brazil, one of the leading countries in the movement towards an international approach to internet governance hosted the World Summit on Internet Governance in Sao Paulo (NETmundial) . Topics such as internet neutrality, intellectual property rights and users’ privacy and freedom were discussed extensively and the result was a Declaration of Basic Principles to guarantee the internet to be more democratic and of public interest.
NETmundial’s organisers argue that Internet governance must be “open, participatory… technologically neutral, sensitive to human rights and based on principles of transparency (and) accountability.”
The future of internet is not only about technical development, but also political cooperation and social maturity. Without the two latter, any development aiming at changing — and hopefully at improving — our lives, is weakened because the context in which it takes place is unstable and makes no warranty. What we ask you for is reflecting, wherever you live now, on what the role of governments should be in the internet governance, if internet should be subject of any restrictions and, if so, what restrictions are justified.
A new sense of Community
Indeed, one name or another to describe what the future of internet may look like is not relevant, though “the internet of things” is a nice euphemism. Understanding the sense of what it may represent for our lives is really the challenge. Never before a tool has overpassed the limits of communication in the way the internet has done it. We can talk with whoever wherever, almost for free; we can get the latest news from different sources, compare them and build our personal opinion upon them; we can learn countless topics for free; we share music, videos, stories, photos and everything which can be digitalized; we may start a revolution using social media; and we…Yes, the list can get much longer.
The history of internet is linked to the process of giving people the power to generate, manage and share information. We don’t know if someone ever imagined what internet has become, if it would be as revolutionary as it actually is. Jeremy Rifkin , author of “The Zero Marginal Cost Society”, proposes a radical but exciting future in which the internet has a lot to do. When the internet of things becomes a reality, knowledge coming from all the objects connected to the web, will allow us to be more efficient, to reduce costs radically and, desirably, to share those products and services with the rest of people. A very tangible example is the energy. It already exists an initiative called “The Internet of Energy” which will develop distributed systems to connect the “smart” grid with a cloud of devices (electrical vehicles, appliances, buildings, etc.), so that any device can be plugged in and loaded from any source connected to the network.
A society of barter, where I give what you lack and vice versa is what Mr. Rifkin proposes. And all this, thanks to efficiencies provided by a network of things and more conscious users (us), taking advantage of them. It is also thought that opportunities for business will become more accessible. For instance, user innovators, which are more numerous than we think, might feel more encouraged to take the leap and become active makers and run their own entrepreneurial projects. On the other hand, possibilities to create new business models will be indisputably larger, diverse and, most importantly, cheaper. We may be facing a time with a stronger, more purely sense of community. That “maybe someday” some of us ideally imagine, hoping our society can change for good, may be closer than we think.
“Cisco forecasts that by 2022, the private sector productivity gains wrought by the Internet of Things will exceed $14 trillion. A General Electric study estimates that productivity advances from the Internet of Things could affect half the global economy by 2025.”(Source:Virgin Records)
(All pictures are under Creative Commons License)
